


The Metric Weight of Grief

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-21
Updated: 2005-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:39:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius is gone.  Remus grieves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Metric Weight of Grief

For eight mornings afterward, Remus wakes and stares at the wall.

Grief has weight. It takes long, thoughtful minutes before he can summon the energy to displace it, to inch back the bedclothes and stumble to the bathroom. Six of the eight mornings he sinks to the floor, back against the dingy tile.

On the eighth afternoon he leaves.

He Apparates five times, without any clear idea where he's going. When he stops, he's standing on a dirt-grass footpath, face turned upward, watching the clouds roll over the unfinished peak of a hill-become-a-mountain. He climbs without thinking.

Grief. He'd _forgotten_.

He remembers now, feels the echoes of old loss ripple through the solidity of his bones. It was like this then, too – the sense of moving through water, limbs protesting. Stretches of numbness, despair as an anesthetic, whole hours lost to the listless study of sunlight spilling over wood.

( _Why_ moves through his blood, an inescapable beat to mark him, place him still among the living.)

Around him, life accelerates.

Then, as now, he clung to stillness. _Impossible thing, I wish, I wish_. His fingernails rip and bleed as the world spins out from underneath his grasp and nothing slows. A proper pace – an ambling, comfortable spill of days might make it bearable. Then as now, then as now.

 _There's been a death._

So sorry –

\-- but . . .

He's laughed four times since it happened, remembers each one for the slice of regret that cut his breathing into pieces as he heard the sound patter against table and floor.

The grass is damp when he sits, breathing the old English words for this place like a incantation. _Mam Tor_. Shivering Mountain – a spill of rock that consents to tremble with the years that lap at its edifice.

He grinds the heel of his hand over his heart and shuts his eyes against the sun.

  
  
____spacer____

 _Hope Valley, as seen from Mam Tor_   



End file.
